Physical Divinity

As tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism rose throughout the Protestant Reformation, artists and poets organized themselves along religious lines. Catholic artists such as Peter Paul Rubens began creating Counter-Reformation altarpieces, while John Donne, an Anglican and later the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, wrote a series of religious sonnets that describe his means of connecting with God. Both of these artists, despite their religious differences, approached religion through physicality, using more understandable conceptions of physicality to ask questions of and hypothesize about the metaphysical aspects of divinity.

For John Paul Rubens, the creation of Counter-Reformation altarpieces allowed for the reimagination of Old Testament stories. Rubens created images of religious figures as distinctly, voluptuously human, engaged in distinctly human activities. His use of lighting on his figures gives them an otherworldly glow, however, maintaining their distance from the painting's viewers. In his Samson and Delilah, Rubens depicts Samson with carefully formed planes of muscle, with veins and sinews visible among the lines of muscle. While the size of his physical stature may separate Samson from the common viewer, his precarious position sleeping in Delilah's lap lowers him back onto the plane of humanity. The shearing of his hair lowers him further to the decimated state he occupies in the biblical story. Delilah's naked breasts slip out of her dress as her man cuts Samson's hair, looking down at the man sleeping on her lap dressed in bright red cloth. Her own golden hair spill over her shoulder, giving her an unkempt look. The almost wild appearance of Delilah and the overtly physical and sexual qualities of her figure places her once again in the position of temptress, an archetype she occupies throughout art. But even in this extremely physical painting, the figures are lit with a bright light coming from the left side of the painting, giving them an almost other-worldly glow. The skin of Delilah's throat, shoulders, and breast appear ivory next to the stark white of her sleeves, while the light glances off of the ridges of Samson's muscles, making his skin appear almost golden. Thus, Rubens uses the lighting in the painting to show the figures' religious importance even in their fully physical positions in this painting. The religious figures depicted in this painting are fully physicalized to tie the religion to physicality, in an attempt to influence the viewers' relation to the divine. 

The Reformation's stance against the lavish decorations common in Catholicism meant that Protestant painters could not depict religious figures in the same way that Catholic painters like Rubens could. For that reason, the depiction of physicality in relation to Protestantism was found more often in words and sermons than in paintings or stained glass. John Donne was one such writer who used the language of physicality to describe his relationship with the "three-personed God." Drawing on the language of his highly physical secular poetry, which he abandoned after taking religious orders, Donne wrote sonnets like his "Holy Sonnet 14" that physicalized his relationship with God. In this sonnet, Donne asks God to "batter [his] heart" in the hope that he "may rise, and stand." He asks God, "bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new," characterizing the Christian rebirth in terms of extreme physical change. Donne draws on the language of humanity beings Christ's bride, saying that he is "betrothed unto [God's] enemy" and begging God, "Divorce me, untie or break that knot again." His language becomes more forceful when he asks God, "Take me to you, imprison me," and finally becomes sexualized when he remarks, "for I, / [...] never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me." This sexualized language of God "ravishing" Donne completely physicalizes the divine relationship to a point that not even the sexualization of religious figures in painting can, humanizing the divine relationship in a manner that still emphasizes the power of God over human life.

The Poem in the Museum